"Project Horseshoe" attempts to address game industry ethics

No, this is still not the long-promised part 2 of my actual Diablo III design series, but it does have some application to D3, specifically the state of the game at launch, and I just had to mention it. It all started with this video from Pretty Good Gaming:

The report itself is here, if you want to read the whole thing. It's more about ethical monetization than anything else, and is clearly being driven by the current discussion about loot boxes. As I was listening to the points on this list being read off, though, it occurred to me that several of the "Ethical Monetization Golden Rules" sounded like things that Blizzard could have benefited from knowing before they launched D3.

"Players should not regret purchasing"

D3 launched in a literally unplayable state. It took a full day, 24 hours, to successfully download and install the game, because the box copy that I'd bought only included the launcher/installer for the game, and not the game itself. Even when the game was installed, it was unplayable because Error37; even when they got the game stabilized, it turned out to be full of bugs because they hadn't tested it properly; and even when they squashed those bugs, it quickly became evident that the game was simply not well-designed. I'll be unpacking that last in more detail on this blog, but the fact that Josh Mosqueira set about redesigning a lot of the game, once he took the reigns from Jay Wilson, kinda speaks for itself, here.

So, did I regret purchasing D3? OMG, yes.

"Don’t lie to your players."

Our industry has a history of broken promises; we aim high when creating games and often fail to deliver our players’ lofty expectations. Blaming players for misunderstanding our intentions does little to repair trust, we must be vigilant and deliberate in our honesty when it comes to monetization.

"Rose-tinted glasses." Blizzard literally spent years blaming players' "unrealistic" expectations of D3 for the fact that those players were disappointed with the game that launched. They spent years gaslighting their own fans, striving to convince us that Diablo II actually kinda sucked, and should always have been an online-only experience (yes, in an age of dial-up internet). They almost had me convinced that I  might have simply outgrown the ARPG genre. They were wrong to do all of those things.

They since quietly stopped, of course, and now talk about how all feedback from players, even negative feedback, had value for them; that started right about the time that they were busy adding not-quite-the-Horadric-Cube to the game, having already added not-quite-the-Paladin. They've since added the straight-up-Necromancer, taking the act of pandering to D2's fans from not-very-subtle to not-subtle-at-all, but they've never apologized for trash-talking and gaslighting their own fans in the first place, which is why so many of them decamped for Path of Exile, never to return.

"Don’t change the player contract."

There is a contract that exists between the developer and player for any game. This contract is constructed out of direct communication about the game, experience players have with other games, and market expectations. For instance, it is implied that a sequel to a game will include all the features of the original, or that systems introduced at the beginning of a game will continue to function as expected throughout the game.

Yes, the Auction House had to go, since the devs (by their own admission) couldn't even start to fix the game as long as it continued to be designed around D3's shitty post-purchase monetization model, but the fact that D3's devs basically removed trading of any kind in the process drove even more players away. I still maintain that trading is a niche activity in ARPGs, and not the core activity that many assume it to be, but there's still no arguing the simple fact that it's really, really popular with a very vocal minority of the genre's fans, and a lot of them bought D3 specifically for the AH, only to have it taken away.

The same applies for the game's promised Arena Deathmatch PVP mode, which couldn't be made fun in a game whose entire design is antithetical to any kind of balance - again, PVP is niche for an ARPG, not core, but a significant percentage of D3's players bought the game for this feature, which Blizzard was hyping as a potential e-sport before launch, and then never got it.

Also, this:

"Don’t set expectations that are not delivered on."

This applies equally to delivering promised features with a game release and to ensuring that the purchasing power of your in-game currencies stays consistent. Everything about a player’s experience sets expectations. Betraying those expectations to create more opportunities for spending makes it hard to believe future promises.

Blizzard is infamous for not releasing games, or even announcing their launch dates, until the games are basically finished, which can be very frustrating. Oh, if only they'd done that with D3, too.

Long-time Diablo fans wanted a sequel to D2. They effectively got a crappy PC port of an unfinished console game instead, one which ditched a lot of what made D2 work in the first place (and, yes, I'll get to that, just not today). I might never buy another Blizzard game, because of my D3 experience, and I am not alone. D2 fans came to its sequel expecting a Blizzard experience; what they got instead was an Activision experience.

And, while Blizzard did spend a year patching the game up to something resembling a finished state, they were also spending that year working on the console version that they'd previously told players wasn't in the works. When they started hyping console D3 to their PC player base by showing off all the cool, new features that the console version was getting, and that the PC version didn't have, clearly hoping that disappointed PC players would buy the game a 2nd time on a different platform, PC players reacted with predictable outrage... and by heading for the exits.

When Blizzard finally did announce changes which would start seriously addressing D3's issues, they promised that everyone who owned the game would get access to those fixes... and then put half of the "fixes" behind a $40 expansion pack paywall. Failure to deliver promised features at launch, and after launch? Check, and check. Withholding promised improvements from players in order to create more opportunities for spending? Check.

In conclusion...

As I've said a couple of times here, some of my points clearly need to be elaborated on, and I'll do that in later blog posts (it's the whole point of this blog, after all), but I didn't want to let this moment pass by without at least mentioning just how profoundly Blizzard failed at some of the ethics, here. To the best of my knowledge, nobody from Blizzard has actually apologized for any of these failures, either; even Josh Mosqueira's post-Reaper of Souls GDC appearance only touched on D3's horrific launch before moving on to talk about what a great state his game was in (spoiler alert: it actually isn't in a great state at all, which I'll get to in later blog posts).

The Project Horseshoe folks are not altruists. They're videogame industry veterans, mostly from AAA, who are concerned that the lack of ethics often displayed by the likes of Activision, EA, and Ubisoft is actually harming the long-term health of their industry. I think they're right about that; whether the AAA publishers listen to them, and actually adopt their Golden Rules, is still an open question. But all you have to do, to see the detrimental effects of not doing so, is look at some of the videogame industry's cautionary examples, like Star Wars: Battlefront 2, or Destiny 2, or Mass Effect: Andromeda... or Diablo 3. All of those games did decent sales and garnered decent reviews from critics, and there's a very real possibility that none of them will get another sequel.

Ethics matter, and not just to fans of games. Here's hoping the big wigs of videogames are actually listening.